World’s Largest Arms Dealer Strains to Stop Arms Flow

One gets the impression, reading the New York Times‘ coverage of the WikiLeaks cables, that the paper is particularly interested in documents that portray the State Department in a good light, struggling to do good in a world that continually resists its efforts. Take today’s front-page piece (12/7/10), “America Prods and Protests But Can’t Halt Arms Trade.”

The piece, by Michael Gordon and Andrew Lehren, details “the United States’ efforts to prevent buildups of arms…in some of the world’s tensest regions.” The piece does include an acknowledgment that “the United States is the world’s largest arms supplier, and with Russia, dominates trade in the developing world”; the U.S. is, in fact, the seller in 40 percent of global arms deals, and delivers arms to some of the most repressive and war-torn countries in the world (Extra!, 5/10). Gordon and Lehren go on to note, “Its role as a purveyor of weapons to certain allies–including Israel, Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf states–has drawn criticism that it has fueled an arms race.”

But aside from these two sentences of context, the rest of the article overwhelmingly presents the contradictory case that, as the Times‘ Web headline has it, the “U.S. Strains to Stop Arms Flow.”

Extra! Magazine Editor Since 1990, Jim Naureckas has been the editor of Extra!, FAIR's monthly journal of media criticism. He is the co-author of The Way Things Aren't: Rush Limbaugh's Reign of Error, and co-editor of The FAIR Reader: An Extra! Review of Press and Politics in the '90s. He is also the co-manager of FAIR's website. He has worked as an investigative reporter for the newspaper In These Times, where he covered the Iran-Contra scandal, and was managing editor of the Washington Report on the Hemisphere, a newsletter on Latin America. Jim was born in Libertyville, Illinois, in 1964, and graduated from Stanford University in 1985 with a bachelor's degree in political science. Since 1997 he has been married to Janine Jackson, FAIR's program director. You can follow Jim on Twitter at @JNaureckas.

The geo political game goes on. The top arms dealer in the world, is the United States. If you add up the sales of the other nine countries that are no the list, and add their total sales up, the United States passes all of them combined. It is very frustrating to have any country selling arms, but it has been going on for centuries. THe way to block those three from selling arms is to not bluff about war, but to actually take action. For with North Korea they have been listening since 1953, and somehow each time they get paid off. It is almost as if we say we are really really really really mad this time you better be careful, and by the way we forgive you the debt that you owe us.

Selling arms to the Saudis, Israel, et al is nowhere the same as selling weapons to the African nations, the Taliban…
Exactly which states get arms from the United States is really the essential part of the argument and your article is weakest in this regard.
Who is currently selling landmines and automatic weapons: you can buy a lot of that with the cost of one transport or radar plane, which largely just sits and does nothing to anyone.

The Saudi Family are Wahabists which are just as bad as any Taliban or Al Qeada or any other fundamentalist who wishes to establish absolute power following a peculiar version for their religion.

We have our fair share of like minded Christians like the Dominionists and White Nationalists who if they could would be just as the old Testament in modern times with modern elements of the police state. They are in our military, corporations, churches etc and they want to take control. Return to the theocracies of the past like the Massachucetts Bay colony.

The CEOs of the major arms-producing companies in the U.S. should be publicly identifiedso they can be vilified instead of our catering to their wealth built on killing. They are among the very rich who lobbied for the tax cut extension tragically included in the current Obama bill. NAME NAMES! — THEN VILLIFY AS DESERVED!
George Beres

…did michael e just say something that wasn’t regurgitated FOXPAC spew? And if so, isn’t there a quatrain in Nostradamus about that? (I’m almost positive it’s right after the one in which the Seventh Seal blows the Last Bicycle Horn and juggles the Unkinged Crown.)